“... After all, their function is to provide myths for scribblers. And who cares anyway? – the self-justifying memoirs of today’s criminals soon turn to dusty junk. Who can blame Biggs for cynicism after his attempt to come clean with the Daily Express and thereby give himself up, only to be instantly betrayed and done out of his agreed £35,000 by the ...”

“... flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion ...”

“... to give us an account of ourselves. The nub of Taylor’s position is the claim that man is a ‘self-interpreting animal’. One way in which a human agent differs from other animals is by the possession of a conception of himself, an understanding of who he is and what he is doing. An agent’s self-understanding is not ...”

“... and personality, is somehow more reassuring and constant than her relation to her own remembered self. Mirror Writing discussed dandyism and style informally, as one of the ways in which identity is constructed. Adorned in Dreams continues and considerably extends this discussion in much more concrete terms. The book is, as she says, an attempt ‘to view ...”

“... in fostering a new, virulently anti-Soviet ‘politics of interest’ – or, some would say, self-interest. I’d also heard that he was becoming very fierce about gays, dykes and nukes – indeed, any new or fashionable grouping that got in the way of the immediate and pressing task of rebuilding American morale. It was easy to see, then, that he was ...”

“... its influence on western thinking. In the latter, she suggested that to be human is ‘To name the self, the world, and God’, and that this power of naming has been stolen from women, now as much as in the Adamic myth. Gyn/Ecology extends that argument and is, as she says of its title, ‘a way of wrenching back some word-power’. This involves linguistic ...”

“... way his generation is going; what he hasn’t got is a language to make us sit up and listen. Will Self’s idiolect is more inventive than Bracewell’s; the suavely metaphorical turn of his prose and the yawning insolence of his tone are far more captivating. But Cock & Bull has none of Bracewell’s amiability. It consists of two novellas, the one the ...”

“... oblique insult by implication: but he sees the texts written out of this mentality as essentially self-consistent, plottable within a narrative of Neronian history. In Political Dissidence under Nero (1993), Rudich showed something like a blind faith in the ‘sources’, and imagined a challenging ‘dissident sensibility’ in the Julio-Claudian élite. He ...”

“... be making a wry comment on her husband’s profession – the writing of novels could be seen as a self-indulgent and sterile occupation. Developing, if unconsciously, the metaphorical potential of the theme, another character, Jocelyn, says later that what she ‘can’t be doing with are novels about the trials and tribulations of middle-class North London ...”

“... battle with a mass of defeatisms. He was plagued by, as he described it, a ‘dissolution of the self’. Or was it, he would wonder, that he did not have a real self at all? ‘Bovarysme’ was another of the insults he heaped on himself. He had written, intermittently, throughout the 1930s, without succeeding in getting ...”

“... pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as austerity and self-denial, those old-fashioned Protestant virtues, succumbed to what Samuel Johnson extolled as the ‘innocent pleasures’ of money-making. Acquisitive ‘passions’ previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as ‘interests’, while ...”

“... trying to convince herself it doesn’t matter that she is not as pretty as Sara Ludlow. But her self-hatred is revealed in a bizarre scene in her bedroom, when she uses her teddy bears to enact a Jerry Springer role-play that culminates in her fantasising her own death. Jessica’s male counterpart is Claude, an ex-coke addict obsessed with weapons, who ...”

“... in general. Why would the Society of Jesus prove more tricky? Well, there is the long history of self-advertisement, which has sometimes seemed to be one of its special characteristics, and the equally long history of hostility and denigration; picking your way between the two is probably not the ideal method of getting hold of the real and substantial ...”

“... stooped, gazing through the viewfinder or bent over the developing tray, even though in his self-portraits he is a paragon of ‘uprightness’, short and muscular, with an obvious liking for the gym. Within a few years of independence he was running a studio in Bobo Dioulasso, 350 km west of the capital Ouagadougou, and building up a remunerative ...”

“... previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions over and over again, and feature endings that seem determined to mock and disappoint.‘A writer needs some direction,’ Vesta tells herself in an extended dialogue with the mystery-writing advice page,some ...”